In this file photo, President Barack Obama greets Buzz Aldrin, left, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, in the Oval Office at The White House in Washington.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Call it NASA: The Next Generation. The president is pointing America toward a new direction in space, and some heroes from NASA's long-ago glory days don't like it.

New rockets to the moon have been canceled. And the space shuttles are about to be mothballed. Instead, the Obama administration wants to rely more on private companies to fly into space over the next few years, while also working to develop a big, new government rocket ship.

But the plan lacks details, and neither a specific initial destination nor a spacecraft has been settled on.

The old space hands aren't buying it. From Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, to the last astronaut to leave his footprints there, many Apollo-era space veterans are upset. They especially don't like President Barack Obama's cancellation of President George W. Bush's return-to-the-moon mission. They accuse Obama of abandoning American leadership in space to the Chinese and Russians.

But others in a younger generation — including Internet pioneers of the 1990s — are excited about the president's vision. NASA will spend $6 billion to encourage private companies to build their own spaceships to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. They see the Obama plan as the only way to eventually get astronauts to Mars.

‘Generational shift’
"This is a generational shift in the space program," said MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley, who served on a White House-appointed panel last year to re-evaluate the space program.

In a visit to Cape Canaveral on Thursday, the president will try to sell a skeptical space community on his concept. He is bringing some new adjustments to the plan to demonstrate his commitment to exploring space, building spacecraft and keeping local jobs, administration officials said.

Video: Space cuts to hit U.S. prestige, scientist says
The Obama plan extends the space station's life by five years and puts billions into research to develop the big new rocket ship capable of reaching a nearby asteroid, the moon or other points in space. Those stops would be stepping stones on an eventual mission to Mars. But the specifics have not been worked out.

PayPal founder Elon Musk said his company SpaceX hopes to fly astronauts to the space station by the end of 2013. He figures he will charge NASA about $20 million an astronaut. That's a bargain compared with the more than $300 million a head it was going to cost NASA under the Bush plan, and the $56 million NASA will pay Russia for trips on Soyuz rockets in the short term.

Musk's Falcon 9 unmanned rocket is sitting on a Cape Canaveral pad with its initial launch a month away. Several companies are competing with Musk, including one run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Musk said what's happening is "the new generation of space."

Space veterans dislike the change
But Armstrong, Eugene Cernan, who was the last man to walk on the moon, and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell spent much of March together, touring the Persian Gulf. They talked about how much they dislike the change in space priorities, Cernan said.

"We have just given up manned spaceflight," Cernan said. "It is the demise of American people in space except in someone else's vehicle. This is a catastrophe."

Lovell said the concept of putting more money into technology is fine, but the plan lacks vision.

"The whole idea of any program is you have to set a goal," Lovell said. "You don't just build technology and figure out what to do with it. ... The whole thing is flawed."

And Armstrong, a famously private person, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he had "substantial reservations" about the Obama plan.

The split is not entirely along generational lines: Armstrong's Apollo 11 moonwalking partner back in 1969, Buzz Aldrin, has publicly supported the president's plan, while some younger shuttle astronauts oppose it.

On Monday, 27 former astronauts and senior NASA officials — including Bush's NASA chief, Michael Griffin — wrote an open letter to the president, contending that canceling the moon program would cede American leadership in space technology.

"One of the greatest fears of any generation is not leaving things better for the young people of the next," the letter said. "In the area of human spaceflight, we're about to realize that fear; your NASA budget proposal raises more questions about our future than it answers."

Musk, who was born two years after Armstrong's "one giant leap for mankind," said there is a lot of anger about the president's plan.

"This is a pretty revolutionary move and revolutions generate anger," Musk told the AP. "But if we don't do it, there's no future in space."

Concern over lost jobsAdd to all that angst a shrinking work force because the 29-year-old space shuttle fleet will be retired after three more flights.

Many critics of the president's space plan, such as Chris Kraft, the legendary engineer who ran Mission Control from Mercury through Apollo, say the end of the shuttle is a major mistake. They say it will force America to rely on the Russians for increasingly expensive rides into orbit until new ships are built.

The decision to retire the shuttle fleet was actually made in 2004 to fund Bush's moon mission plan. Obama killed the moon mission in February. But the White House argues that astronauts will actually be spending twice as much time in space under the new plan as under the Bush plan because Obama extended the life of the space station.

In response to the criticism and in an effort to relieve Florida job fears, Obama administration officials said Tuesday that the president will announce two changes:

—Reviving the Orion crew capsule designed under the Bush moon plan.

—Speeding up development of the massive new rocket. It could be ready around the end of the decade, a few years earlier than previously planned.

Overall, the Obama program would mean 2,500 more Florida jobs than the old Bush program, administration officials say.

The Orion capsule wouldn't be used for its original purpose — landing on the moon. It would be sent unmanned to the space station to be used as an escape vehicle. That would mean U.S. astronauts wouldn't have to rely on the Russian Soyuz for an emergency flight home.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called the president's plan "pretty dynamic and pretty bold. The thing that makes it different from any other vision is that it's funded."

The Bush plan had some serious drawbacks: It had already cost NASA $9.1 billion. Because of earlier budget cuts, the new moon rocket was way behind schedule, and there was no money to build a lunar lander, White House and NASA officials said.

One problem with the Obama plan is that the White House botched the job of explaining the concept, said space scholar John Logsdon of George Washington University.

"It's absolutely crucial that Obama articulate a clear sense of what we're up to," he said. "It's hard because it's a relatively sophisticated strategy."

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Video: NASA frets over space privatization

Closed captioning of: NASA frets over space privatization

>>>president obama
heads to the
kennedy space center
in
florida today
in an attempt to sell his new leaner vision for the u.s.
space program
. it is a plan drawing fire from some of
nasa
's biggest heroes and thousands of employees who say he is
lost in space
.
nbc
's tom
costello
is at the
kennedy space center
with more. tom, good morning to you.

>>reporter: hi,
meredith
, good morning. the president could get a chilly
reception
when he's here today. canceling the
shuttle program
's not his doing, that's been years in the making. but his
decision
to cancel the remaining
constellation program
and then return to private business has a lot of
america
's
nasa
heroes -- let me say that again. some of
nasa
's heroes are very concerned about the future of
manned spaceflight
.

>>that's one small step for man --

>>reporter: it is an argument over the future of
america
's
space program
that has put the first two men who ever walked on the moon on opposite sides.
buzz aldrin
supports the president's plan for
private companies
to ferry astronauts to the
space station
.

>>it was that way in the aviation industry. the
government
stimulated
air travel
for the
airlines
by financing the delivery of the mail. and i think that's the way that transportation in
space
should evolve.

>>reporter: while
neil armstrong
and others don't like going commercial and don't like abandoning
nasa
's
constellation program
, a troubled effort to launch astronauts to the
space station
, the moon, and beyond.

>>in one slash of the
budget
, and going to a "commercial" way of doing things, we're going to destroy, we're going to say let's just start over. and it just can't be done that easy or that quickly.

>>reporter: here's what's certain -- the
space shuttle
is retiring this fall which means
russia
will ferry astronauts to the
space station
. the
obamaadministrationwantsprivate companies
to take over in about five years. that's about the same time it will decide on a rocket to go deeper into
space
, perhaps even mars. by losing both the shuttle and constellation programs, thousands of jobs are on the line. in
cape canaveral
, a city that's become synonymous with the
space program
, the mayor says it will be a
big hit
.

>>the best we can figure out is about 20% to 22% of our economy comes from the
space industry
, directly and indirectly.

>>reporter:
chris
has one of those jobs. he works in the
white room
preparing astronauts for the final minutes before launch. now he's preparing for the worst.

>>we're going to have to go seek work elsewhere. i'll try to stay in this area. love this area, been here for 21 years, but if anything happens where i can't find work, we're going to have to move.

>>reporter: the president insists, the
white house
insists that when the president is here he will talk about aid to people who are going to be losing their jobs. $40
million
in assistance to
florida
and the
white house
also insists that this entire
program
could eventually mean more jobs for
florida
and not fewer jobs. matt, back to you.

The 12 orbiting astronauts on the International Space Station were hailed by the chief on Thursday — and also got a humorous scolding for keeping their android crewmate locked up in its packing for so long.